Ethics in Light of Childhood

7. The Art of Ethical Thinking

167 THE PHILOSOPHER Gareth Matthews has demonstrated that children are complex philosophical, spiritual, and ethical thinkers. Here is one example he gives of an infant, Michael Brown, fifteen months old: [Michael] was struggling with his friend, Paul, over a toy. Paul started to cry. Michael appeared concerned and let go of the toy so that Paul would have it, but Paul kept crying. Michael paused, then gave his teddy bear to Paul, but the crying continued. Michael paused again, then ran into the next room, returned with Paul’s security blanket, and offered it to Paul, who then stopped crying.1 Matthews’s argument is not that children possess some kind of superior moral wisdom to adults. It is simply that, contrary to popular understandings of moral development, especially in the West, “some very young children sometimes act in genuinely moral ways, not just in pre-moral ways.”2 In a similar way, Myra Bluebond-Langner has shown that children’s ethical and other kinds of thinking and acting are more intricate than often imagined in situations of the child’s chronic illness or impending death. A ten-year-old girl, Britt Foster, is in the hospital with an advanced stage of the fatal illness cystic fibrosis (CF). She is talking with her father about her nine-year-old brother Tyler: “He worries a lot,” Britt replied offhandedly [to her father] while she continued to color. “He worries about me mostly. I don’t know why. Here, I’m coloring the shirt in. Sometimes he talks to me about what he worries about. Sometimes, I wouldn’t say much, because he doesn’t want me to know. He just, well, I can hear it on the phone that he is. At home he says, ‘If you don’t eat you’re going to die.’ Or he says, ‘You’re going to die, BriBri.’ Chapter 7 The Art of Ethical Thinking He’s, I don’t know. He’s scared. He’s heard a lot of CF patients die. He’s really scared. [More discussion of coloring]. I don’t get scared. No, I don’t get scared. Tyler gets scared because he thinks I’m gonna die. But I don’t get scared, because I know I’m not, because I know I’m strong enough. When I was four years old I fought it off, because I was going to die, but I fought it off. I was only twelve months old or something and I did then too. I don’t know how, but I did.” . . . “I’m a fighter,” Britt announced. “Tyler just doesn’t understand that I am.”3 Britt is actively thinking through a variety of difficult issues. She is struggling with the possibility of her own death, folding it into her larger story of being a fighter. She is also working out a way to respond to the different feelings of her brother, who is likewise having a difficult time with her illness. Moreover, she is also reassuring her father. In the language of this book, she is recreating her own narrative world and decentering it in response to others. In fact, we have encountered many examples of children’s multifaceted ethical thinking throughout the previous chapters: Ying Ying Fry’s concern for abandoned babies, Tony Anderson’s articulation of his right to be heard, Ishmael Beah’s decision to participate in war and then heal from it, and so on. Examples could be multiplied as many times as there are children. Children’s moral thinking capabilities are as complex and diverse as those of adults. Strangely, this better understanding of children as ethical thinkers has had little to no effect on ideas about ethics itself. On the contrary, what it means to think in an ethical way is, if anything, understood today in an especially adult-centered way. Ethicists tend to assume an adult subject. On the whole, ethical thinking is either rationalistic or traditionalistic. On the one hand, it means exercising autonomy, calculating utilitarian ends, or participating in social argumentation. On the other, it consists in exhibiting good character traits, applying communal virtues, or expressing one’s particular culture. The first takes adulthood as its model while the second gives adults all the power. The time has come to ask the difficult question of how the ways in which children think ethically should transform how to understand ethical thinking as such. This question brings us to a further kind of moral practice...